Flebile
Plaintive, wistful.
What it means
Flebile means “tearful, plaintive” and calls for a wistful expression. The word goes back to flere, “to weep,” and belongs to that group of character designations that name grief and pain. The Italian dictionary Treccani lists, besides “tearful, plaintive”, the meaning “gentle and wistfully sweet”.
Within this group the differences lie in the colouring. Doloroso means the pain itself, lamentabile and lamentoso the lament, mesto quiet sadness. Flebile designates the tearful tone — a grief that expresses itself quietly and resonates in the sound.
The marking concerns expression, not tempo, but has an effect on it: a plaintive performance is as a rule calm.
In the notation
The word is written in italics above the staff, usually after a tempo word, and applies until a new marking. It is often found together with minor harmony, descending two-note figures, and suspensions — means with which music since the Baroque depicts lament.
Musical use
The designation is used in slow movements, in arias and songs with a corresponding text, and in instrumental pieces of a plaintive character. A well-known example is the slow movement of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D minor of 1829, headed Adagio flebile con sentimento.
The instruction calls for a plaintive, tearful expression with a soft, often quiet tone. It stands in slow movements and arias in which grief or pity is to be expressed. Sighing motifs, falling lines, and suspensions belong to the musical material of such passages. Flebile is related to lamentoso and doloroso but stresses more strongly the soft, the tearful. The tempo is slow, the dynamics drawn back. Drawn back does not mean thin, though: plaintive music, too, needs a sustaining tone that holds the line.
Performance practice
Bring out the sighing figures: weight on the first note, yielding on the second. Keep the dynamics restrained — lament seems stronger restrained than loud. Give suspensions time and let the resolutions become quieter. And avoid exaggeration; the expression lies in the score, not in what is added.